When Science Forgot the Soul

The Biggest Misunderstanding in Modern Science

For most of human history, the study of the natural world was never separated from the study of spirit and the early scientists - many of whom were alchemists - viewed nature as a living system animated by intelligence, rhythm, and relationship.

Over time, however, the scientific worldview shifted toward a more mechanical understanding of reality: one that emphasized control, prediction, and material measurement above all else. While this shift brought remarkable technological progress, it also quietly severed a deeper relationship between humanity and the living cosmos.

Today, many thinkers are beginning to revisit that divide, asking whether something essential was lost when science divorced itself from consciousness, nature’s rhythms, and the wisdom traditions that once guided human understanding.

What if our well-being, creativity, and even our scientific insight deepen when we move back into alignment with the timing and flow of the natural world? What might be revealed when we are honoring the same cosmic rhythms that govern the tides, the seasons, and the cycles of life itself? Dr. Theresa Bullard, Physicist shared the following:

Q: What is the biggest misunderstanding in modern science?

A: Well, it is that science says we are all separate.

There are four major principles that came out of Newtonian science. One of them is that everything is deterministic. It says that the universe should work like clockwork. Today we know that's not true, but we still tend to think that way. That idea of determinism really made its way into the mindset during the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, when rationality and reason started to become prominent.

Determinism says that if we know all the initial conditions and we have everything planned out properly, then we should be able to control and predict how everything is going to flow from here. It's predictable. It's controllable because it's deterministic.

The second principle is separation. Reductionism and separation go together. The idea is that if we separate out all the parts that make up a whole and isolate each of those parts, then study each part, we should automatically know how the whole works. That's reductionism. We reduce things to their parts, study the individual pieces, and assume we understand the whole.

But that completely ignores synergy, meaning the interaction, the relationship, the complexity that emerges when two parts interact with each other. It's thinking of reality very mechanistically, like gears in a clock. But that's not how living systems work.

Separatism says that we are separate, that you and I are separate, and that even the mind and body are separate. Once things are separated like that, it can lead to the idea that I have to fear something outside of me.

Then when you add Darwinian ideas (especially the popular interpretation of "survival of the fittest," which actually wasn't Darwin's original theory) you add the principle of competition on top of separation. It becomes the belief that we have to fight for survival, that we have to fight for limited resources, and that only the strong survive.

To clarify: Darwin's original theory was actually that the weakest get eliminated, not that only the strongest survive. There’s a real difference there. He also said species survive far more through cooperation than through competition. But, “competition” was the principle that got extracted and emphasized.

The fourth principle is realism. This is the idea that things are materially and physically real, and therefore the only thing that is real is the material.

And the culmination of this all led to materialism.

We still see this influence today. Even with quantum physics, our scientific paradigm - what we often call scientism - has a kind of dogma. That dogma says only the material is real and everything else is not real. It's just in your head. And if it's in your head, it's subjective. It's not measurable. It doesn't fit within the realm of science.

So, what ultimately occurred was that science divorced itself from consciousness and subjectivity.

And to be clear, that divorce actually happened after Newton, not during Newton's time. Newton himself was an alchemist. He wrote thousands of pages of journals about alchemy. His famous Principia was one paper that presented the laws of motion that allowed scientists to predict planetary cycles, gravity, and so forth. But alongside that one paper were thousands of pages about alchemy.

Alchemy is actually the tradition out of which science emerged.

The alchemists believed that science and spirit, and material and consciousness, were two essential ingredients of a whole. Their experimental work in laboratories was to try to perfect things and to raise the physical up toward the spiritual level while also bringing the spiritual more fully into embodiment within the physical. That was their goal.

So, in the original days of science there was really no separation between mind and matter or between spirit and the physical.

The more I studied alchemy, the more I realized that they actually had a quantum mindset. They just called it something different. They saw that everything was connected. They saw that consciousness was an important part of the process, even when conducting a physical experiment. They believed there was an essence that could be extracted that was eternal.

They had a very different mindset from what science later became.

The reason science divorced itself from spirit was largely political and economic. First, scientists didn't want to infringe on the territory of the Church, which held the authority over spiritual matters. Scientists did not want to threaten the church but they wanted the freedom to explore things and “understand the mind of God”. That was actually the sole aim of many early alchemists. So, they said they wouldn't speak about spirit, in order to continue studying nature without conflict with the Church.

The other reason was economic: To make an alchemical remedy, one must consider the natural processes of time, etc. The alchemical remedy - something that modern pharmacology actually evolved from - you had to pay attention to lunar cycles, solar cycles, and star alignments. You had to work with astrology. You had to grow and harvest plants at certain times. Everything depended on timing and relationship with nature. It wasn't just about a chemical process.

That meant creating an alchemical remedy took much longer. But it also carried a synergy and essence, of a heightened vibration.

Eventually, pharmacology began to separate from that approach so that medicine could focus purely on chemical processes. That allowed remedies to be produced faster and more profitably. In doing so, the field moved away from energetic and consciousness-based considerations and focused entirely on physical chemistry.

Clearly, there were practical motives behind the separation of science and spirit. But I don't think that the separation is fundamental. It's more a belief system—and in part a business decision.

But, wholistic practitioners are on the rise and people are becoming more aware of how they perceive their own bodies. This begs the question:

Q: Are Science and Spirituality Are Reuniting? Do you see a change in that? Do you see it as part of the shift in consciousness many people are speaking about?

A: Dr. Theresa Bullard:
Yes, definitely. This is a big part of why I devoted myself to bridging science and spirit.

Some of the advancements we've made scientifically and technologically may actually have happened because of that temporary separation between science and spirit. So it wasn't entirely a bad thing. We've advanced enormously in technology, knowledge, and scientific understanding.

But the problem is that our knowledge and technology have outpaced our wisdom.

As we gradually divorced ourselves from spirit and religion, the world became more secular, and science became the new authority… the new kind of religion. If everything becomes only about what we can measure, what we can engineer, and what makes sense from a rational material level, then we remove wisdom from the equation.

That becomes dangerous because we are developing extremely powerful technologies. If those technologies are driven by ego, selfishness, or purely material values, they are not used for the good of the whole. And they can be used in destructive ways. We seem to have weaponized everything.

So the advancement of tools, technology, and knowledge without wisdom becomes increasingly dangerous for humanity. It feels like the pendulum swung very far to one side, and now a rebalancing is happening collectively. Many people sense that something is missing. And what is missing is essential for meaning, purpose, joy, and well-being.

At a collective level there is a recognition that spirit matters. We moved far away from ethics and morality, but now there is a movement back toward wisdom.

For some people this appears as spiritual awakening. For others it appears in religious forms. But there is a push toward wisdom, ethics, and concern for the good of the whole—not just a purely material approach to life.

Yes, I think we went through a period of separation. Now we are entering a time of conjunction, which is a recombining of the essential ingredients. And hopefully we do it in a purified way. We've removed some of the dogma and corruption that existed in religion, and we're also seeing new humility emerging in science.

More and more people recognize that the newest frontier is consciousness. This is not only through artificial intelligence or neural technology, but through discovering the potential that still exists within human beings themselves.

From Janice Ann:

Perhaps this is also why so many of us find ourselves in seasons of life that feel uncertain or suspended. Those moments when what was is no more, yet the next step of our purpose has not yet revealed itself.

In a culture conditioned to plan, predict, and control outcomes, these spaces can feel uncomfortable, even like failure. Yet nature does not rush its cycles. Seeds rest in darkness before they sprout, tides recede before they return, and the body itself moves through rhythms of activity and restoration. If the cosmos itself unfolds through timing and relationship rather than force, then perhaps our lives do as well.

The “in-between” seasons may not be empty at all, but part of wiser rhythm - one that asks us to listen more deeply, soften our grip on certainty, and trust that our next expression of purpose will emerge in its proper time, just as every living system does when it moves in harmony with the greater flow of life.